World of Antiquity on MSN

The lost origins of the world’s first civilization

The Sumerians created the world's first cities, developed the earliest known writing system, and laid the foundations for ...
insider.si.edu

The invention of cuneiform writing in Sumer Jean-Jacques Glassner ; translated and edited by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van de Mieroop

1. The Sumerian Account of the Invention of Writing -- 2. Time and Place of the Invention -- 3. Received Ideas: The Pictographic Origins of Cuneiform Writing -- 4. Received Ideas: The Origin of ...
Ancient Origins

Cuneiform: The World's Oldest Writing System and 2,000-Year Mystery to Decode It

This particular development produced what scholars call cuneiform, taken from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge." At first, writing was used as a practical tool primarily for administration, accounting ...
Gizmodo

5,500-Year-Old Seals Offer New Clues About the Birth of Writing

Italian researchers suggest that symbols from the oldest writing system in the world may have come directly from cylinder seal motifs. Reading time 3 minutes For centuries, scholars have puzzled over ...
The New York Times

Hunting for the Dawn of Writing, When Prehistory Became History

CHICAGO One of the stars of the Oriental Institute’s new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond,” is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, ...
Nature

Sumerian Mythology*

TO-DAY everyone in the least interested in archæology has heard of the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia and the cuneiform system of writing that was developed there. Not everyone realizes that only so ...